It would be bad enough if, as is the case, America’s “free press” merely refused to report on these abuses. But members of the media, especially from news organizations braying the loudest about Trump’s “authoritarian” attacks, are now the ones who incite mobs. They are less journalists than they are political officers of a repression more thorough than any that existed under late-stage communism.

In the same way, the main threat used by journalists and the principal means of speech and thought repression in America today is economic terrorism. Gutted of productive high-wage jobs, Americans of all classes have low pay and are burdened with debt to make up for it; most feel they can’t lose employment. The savings rate is very low, and therefore there is little room for error. Many feel losing a job means the end. The magnitude of public, private, and student debt means that no one actually owns anything. Everyone is therefore easily intimidated.

The intensity of anxiety in American life over what you can say, what you can laugh at, what you can think and feel, when you should stop clapping—an extreme and insidious form of repression that communist governments could only approximate with a secret police—is connected to America’s economic problems. The “global economy” means political and social tyranny. Employers are made exceedingly arrogant by the glut of cheap labor that is the result of immigration. The ability to intimidate, not just to pay lower wages, is one of the big reasons H1B and non-American employees are preferred, despite studies that show such employees produce lower-quality work.

In this arrangement, the self-styled “elite,” or Outer Party, is much worse off than it would like to think. I’ve seen many graduates of Ivy schools in New York who work in finance, who only have enough money for an apartment and food, and who live in permanent terror of their employer. Large corporations routinely and absurdly enforce speech and “sexual assault” codes of behavior—go work for a big bank in New York and in orientation you’ll be treated to a four hour “seminar” that rivals in sheer nuttiness any Party rally you would have been forced to attend in 1980 Romania. The “elite,” which in terms of measurable living standard is generally worse off than a middle class citizen of modern Tokyo or even Budapest, is subject to corporate Maoism.

Massive public and private debt, mass immigration, and deindustrialization mean a people beholden to grim-faced clipped-hair HR viragos and soft-cheeked “journalists” who take on the role of capos. It is an intolerable form of slavery, for which the working class couldn’t get, in the bargain, even the feeble pride or paltry salary allowed to the dutiful of the striver class. It is for this that they revolted. Whether Trump delivers or not, he was elected in large part because people felt, even if intuitively, that his economic promises were connected to this push against political repression.

If he can, indeed, stop the pillaging and pauperization that goes under the name of “globalization,” he will have denied the tattletales and sycophants of CNN and the commissar-journalist class their greatest tool of intimidation.